It is a problem that never really goes away. You build your app and at the beginning everything seems to be as planned. Suddenly you realize you are late. For the sake of this post it doesn’t really matter whether late means 6 more months in 18-month long project or a day in a week-long sprint. Either way you realize you won’t make it.
Then, people go crazy.
Depending on team’s maturity you will notice a range of different behaviors. Anything from cutting corners on quality (“we have this buffer here we can use – it is called functional testing”), through abandoning best practices (“maybe we hit the window if we skip writing unit tests”), cheating client (“let’s deploy and we’ll be building the rest while they’re testing”), throwing features out (“oh, they are just saying it is crucial, they’ll manage without this feature and otherwise we won’t make it by the deadline”), to working team’s butts off beyond any limits (“hey guys, I know it’s the fifth weekend in a row, but we need to finish it and we aren’t anywhere close”).
I have a question for you: how often do you consider being late as a viable option?
My wild-ass guess answer: way too rarely.
I mean, how many times in your life have you worked on a system that really had a deadline written in the stone? How many times there would be deadly serious consequences for your users and/or clients if you were late. Not tragically, hopelessly, beyond-any-recovery late, but simply late. Like a day every couple of weeks or a month every year.
Personally I worked on such project only once. We were adjusting ERP system to new law after Poland joined EU. Deadline: May 1, 2004.
Guess what. We were late. A week. And then, like hours after we released we found a bug which basically got medieval on the database. Almost another week to publish a hotfix that made the software usable again. And you know what? Nothing happened. The sun rose again, the moon was there at night, we didn’t lose our jobs, and our clients didn’t lose theirs. It was OK.
It was OK, even though we missed the deadline that actually was written in the stone.
Well, if we missed it by a couple of months we would probably be out of business but still, a couple of weeks were sort of acceptable.
You can miss your deadlines too. They aren’t going to kill you for that I guess. And yes, I am well aware that being a supervisor of a dozen project teams it is unlikely that I am expected to state such opinions so openly.
Yet still I believe that the price we pay for being on time when it can’t happen on reasonable terms more often than not is bigger than any value we might get by hitting the window. And talking about price I think about dollars, euros or whatever currency is on your paycheck. Actually most of the time we pay for decisions mentioned at the beginning of this post long way after the deadline passed. We pay in maintenance cost, we pay in discouraged users that can’t really use the app, and we pay in burned-out teams.
So next time you’re going to make your call, consider this: you can be late. Even more, most of the time, being late is fairly OK.
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